NOTICE:

friends,

this blog is being officially terminated. 

in accordance with what my dear friend, jaimie, so appropriately suggested... i have started a new blog on a different host site. this time in my life is a messy, exciting conglomerate of new beginnings, so the concept of "beginning again elsewhere" seems apt on so many levels. i started this xanga in college, nearly six years ago; i will always have a profound affection for it, and be forever grateful for all of the good memories it holds so faithfully. but i feel as though my move to chicago represents a very concrete chapter break in my story, one which (for better or worse) signals a clean end to so many things that preceded it. 

if you are interested in following my new blog, feel free to request the link here. (or call, text, e-mail, send a facebook message, etc.) i would be delighted to have your continued company on this next leg of the journey. 

love always,

kristin

i have decided to write a series of blog posts
about my new life here in Chicago.

the first of these will be forthcoming. shortly.

stay tuned.

it has occurred to me that i desperately need to demythologize the GRE. this is because i am obscenely, exorbitantly, foolishly terrified of it.

tonight, i cracked open my GRE prep book and flew through the verbal section with appropriate ease. i then attempted to tackle the quantitative section, only to end up utterly befuddled, clueless, and completely humiliated. it was an inconvenient reminder of the fact that my right brain is next to useless... and that THIS is the reason i've never attempted to go to graduate school: THE MATH SECTION OF THE GRE. it might sound pathetic, but those few-pages-and-several-hours-worth of bizarre equations and elusive shape-shifting diagrams are precisely the demons that are killing my dreams.  

i haven't taken a math class in ten years. and i don't know where to start. i look at some of these problems and it's not as though they're unsolvable, by any stretch of the imagination. it's just that i wouldn't have the faintest idea HOW to go about solving them. it's not that they're difficult; it's that they're written in a language i've long since forgotten how to speak.

i don't have time for this. i don't have time to relearn twelve years' worth of basic math skills in order to take this stupid exam. and yet, thanks to our American educational system, i can't pursue my career of choice without it. i would get my Master's and PhD in Europe, where they don't require the GRE, but i don't have the money to fund that.

tonight, i feel thwarted by life. so, naturally, i am sitting on the floor with my prep book and crying toxic tears. when i say "toxic," i mean that they're comprised of all my favorite self-defeating poisons - things like ubiquitous, unfocused frustration and "i'm educationally sub-par" angst. 

but let's be honest. crying is NOT going to help.

i need to get defiant. 

when i was a little girl, i would take my math homework upstairs, into my bedroom, and pretend that i was a (princess, peasant, elven maiden, fairy, magician-in-training) who had been locked in the highest room of the tallest tower by a (witch, sorceress, evil step-mother, general meanie-head) who wanted nothing more than to make my life miserable. i would pretend that she had sentenced me to a life of grueling math equations as punishment for the fact that i was good and beautiful (and blonde!), and that i sang songs with the forest creatures and had never harmed a single being in all my vapid life. for some reason, these childhood fantasies never invoked a (prince, robin hood, dues ex machina) to come and rescue me from my tower room or my horrible sentence. rather, visualizing myself as some kind of martyr lent a strange and salvific glory to my math problems. like sisyphus, i found dignity and motivation in the absurd inevitability of my fate. 

perhaps i need to rediscover that spirit. perhaps i simply need someone to validate the fact that math does, indeed, equal suffering. then, maybe, i can re-enter my childhood fantasy and find some sense of empowerment in how silently and oh-so-patiently i can suffer. 

because trust me, friends, suffer i will.

a complete stranger kissed me on the sidewalk this morning.
it was random and startling, yes... but also, in retrospect, kind of hilarious.

these foreign men, i swear. they just love me.

this weekend, while at the asian american festival in downtown chicago, i found an unusually gorgeous dress.
as is pretty typical of my luck, the dress was a size large.  
so, naturally, rather than walking away feeling defeated...

i bought it.

i then proceeded to alter it, BY HAND, while my roomie and i watched "Paper Heart."

here is the finished product, after the transformation from a size L to a size XS:

my domesticity points for the weekend just went through the roof.